The Sieve! My view of news impacting on the business of events.

Ramler Group of Melbourne has secured the contract to supply furniture and fitout for the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games athlete’s village. This follows their superb delivery for the same

work at London 2012. What a magnificent run Paul Ramler and his team have had.

Congratulations from Eric at New Millennium Business.

Rio 2016 sacked as many as 12 stafffor allegedly ‘stealing’ documents from London 2012 whilst they were participating in the London Observers Program. These were Rio staff who were agreed to ‘shadow’ London staff as they completed their tasks and assigned ‘future roles’. Several were long-standing Rio 2016 employees and their dismissal has raised number of concerns inside and outside the organising committee. Not least is the pattern of sacking OC staff when there appears to be some internal disagreement, rather than approaching the issues on a professional level. One sacked employee, Renata Santiago, published her letter of response to President Carlos Nuzman on social media.

Brazil 2014 FIFA World Cup received a record number of applications from would-be volunteers. A total of 130,919 applied, almost doubling the previous record of 70,000 for the last tournament in South Africa two years’ ago. The vast majority of applicants are Brazilians, with the largest number coming from São Paulo, followed by Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais. Outside of Brazil, the country with the largest number of candidates was Colombia, with 908, followed by Argentina, Spain and Mexico. Brazil 2014 is recruiting 7,000 volunteers for next year’s Confederations Cup, the dry run a year before the World Cup, for which it needs 15,000.

British PM David Cameron has led a teamof government and business leaders on a business mission to Brazil, strongly promoting British events expertise and knowhow. The schedule included meetings with Brazil President Dilma and the direct offer of help across various infrastructure and related projects.

This really how it should be done, way ahead of anything our Aussie governments have ever undertaken, notwithstanding the positioning and pre-eminence of Australian events experts.

Rio real estate prices jumped in 2011 but have steadied in 2012. In 2011 the average cost per square meter in Rio rose a staggering 39.4 percent with the coveted neighbourhoods of Leblon and Ipanema in Rio’s Zona Sul (South Zone) continuing to command the highest figures. Sales of apartments have been much slower in 2012.

2018 FIFA World Cup: The Russia 2018 Local Organising Committee and FIFA have announced the Host Cities of the 2018 FIFA World Cup, as follows: Moscow, the only city with two stadiums, namely Luzhniki and Spartak (central cluster); St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad (Northern cluster); Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Samara, Saransk and Volgograd (Volga river cluster); Rostov-on-Don and Sochi (Southern cluster) as well as Ekaterinburg located in the east. The selected cities fall into four geographical clusters. Distances are enormous and travel times currently very long. Russia will be aiming to keep teams within one or two clusters, rather than sending them across the country during the group stage of the tournament – unlike the 2014 hosts Brazil.

With some $20 billion of spending being mooted to get the event together, the 2018 FIFA World Cup presents substantial opportunities, not least associated with the development and operations of each stadium, the promotions that each city will undertake, and the city management tasks as large numbers of football fans move within each sector and across the country. New Millennium Business recommends you find a professional partner located in Europe, with subsidiaries in Russia, as an entry platform. A partnership with a Russian company is most desirable if that company is well-regarded and well-positioned but beware the local norms that could marginalise you and leave you empty-handed.

Collaboration is the New Competition

Many in business are realising that going it alone in a hyper-connected, globalised economy is counter-productive. Today’s challenges are too interconnected and complex for any one organisation or sector to address on its own. Dow

Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris, who spent a number of years in Australia, has noted that “collaboration is the new competition.”

Two key results of this new way of working are not always in our natural the DNA but should be. They are: Letting go of information, and; the invention of new collaborative problem-solving mechanisms to achieve larger goals.

Today, organisations are using crowdsourcing platforms to leverage a distributed virtual labour pool. Eli Lilly has created a platform called Innocentive by which they and participants can tap into the wisdom of customers, partners, and

others. This is a great example of how the business community is giving up what was long considered proprietary information in order to solve problems.

Letting go of information is also about recognising the importance of being part of a problem-solving network. In today’s world, influential members of those networks must harness technology to share ideas, get real-time feedback, and build collective knowledge.

Have a look at the New Millennium Business Events Convergence model – business collaboration is a key element of that approach.

What makes collaboration so hard? It necessitates reaching across boundaries, building trust quickly, joining the assets of multiple networks, and making everything work together. All in an environment where you may have little or no formal authority, yet face the challenge of overcoming legacy systems, slow-moving bureaucracies, and mind-sets that favour collaboration only as a last resort. This spells out a need for leadership.

New Millennium Business is able to help you on this important journey.

‘Mining’ of spending data: MasterCard Advisors, the professional services arm of MasterCard, have announced a partnership that will enable digital advertising company Exponential’s brands to target their digital ads to audiences based on their offline spending behaviour. Data on spending behaviour, which the companies say is anonymous and not linked to any individual, will be extracted from the more than 25 billion transactions that US MasterCard holders carry out at retail locations annually. Some 310 million people hold a MasterCard in the US and 8.7 million locations accept them.

Doesn’t this herald a new dimension in accessing market information, particularly of consumers?

Addressing consumers…McDonalds will open its first non-meat restaurants in northern India in cities that are pilgrimage sites for Hindus and Sikhs. The McAloo Tikki burger and the Pizza McPuff will be menu leaders. McDonalds does not serve beef or pork products at its 271 outlets in India – their chicken Maharaja Mac is popular with the urban workforce.

Like ‘em or not, there is a lot we can learn from such master-marketers!

Next time – The Sieve will focus on sponsorship action that is changing the shape of sports and the delivery of events.

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